Prison does not begin at the gate, it begins the moment hope realizes it has no future,
Ajifa was fourteen when the iron doors closed behind her, but she had been preparing for this place long before the van stopped. The courtroom had already taught her what justice meant when money was involved. The sentence—thirty years—had landed without ceremony, spoken in a voice that did not tremble, as though condemning a child to adulthood among predators was merely procedure. She did not cry when they shaved
her head, she did not scream when they stripped her clothes and handed her a faded uniform that smelled of old sweat and despair, she didn't flinch when the warder shoved her forward and said, "Na here you go learn sense."
Ajifa looked around and memorized everything.The walls were cracked, damp, stained with years of human residue—blood, urine, tears that had dried into nothing. The air was thick, sour, alive with bodies packed too close together. Women stared openly, eyes measuring her like meat left unattended. Someone laughed, someone else spat, Ajifa kept walking.
Morning came without kindness, it arrived
with boots slamming into metal doors, with shouted numbers, with the smell of boiled grains barely fit for consumption, Inmates rushed not for food, but for position—who stood where, who bowed, who didn't.
Ajifa learned quickly: standing out was dangerous, she kept her head low, her movements precise. She ate slowly, eyes up, never turning her back completely. Hunger gnawed, but she rationed even that. Weakness was currency here.
The first assault came on the fourth day.
Two women cornered her near the latrines. Their smiles were lazy, practiced.
"You fresh," one said. "You go pay tax."
Ajifa said nothing.
Silence angered them more than defiance would have.
They beat her until her ribs screamed and her vision blurred. They took nothing—there was nothing to take—but they left a message written in bruises.
Ajifa dragged herself back to her corner and pressed her face against the floor until the pain stopped shaking.
That night, she sharpened a spoon.
DAY
Violence in prison was not explosive. It was constant.
It lived in glances, in whispers, in sudden silences that meant someone had crossed an invisible line. Knives appeared and disappeared like magic tricks. Fights broke out over space, over food, over nothing at all.
Ajifa watched everything.
She learned which guards could be bribed and which ones preferred bodies. She learned which screams meant death and which meant punishment. She learned that some women had been there so long they no longer remembered their crimes—only the rules.
Sex was not negotiated.
It was taken.
Sometimes by inmates. Sometimes by those meant to protect them. Complaints vanished into drawers that never opened again.
Ajifa stopped feeling her body as her own.
She became strategic.
When she finally fought back, it was quick and final.
The woman never saw the blade.
Afterward, no one touched Ajifa again without permission.
Fear respected efficiency.
NIGHT
Night was the worst.
Darkness magnified everything—the groans, the whispered deals, the sobbing. Some women prayed. Others laughed hysterically. Some lay still, waiting for morning or death, whichever came first.
Ajifa slept in fragments.
Her dreams were empty.
No father. No mother. No sister.
Just corridors. Just doors.
Just her.
THE ADAPTATION
By her third year, Ajifa had stopped counting time.
She had grown lean, muscles wired tight beneath her skin. Her eyes were older, sharper. Her silence had become legendary.
She had two allies.
One was an old woman who spoke only in the evenings, telling Ajifa stories about patience and waiting. The other was a violent inmate who admired Ajifa's refusal to plead.
Everyone else was either an enemy or irrelevant.
When knives flashed, Ajifa moved first.
When guards demanded favors, she negotiated from a position of strength.
When newcomers cried, she did not comfort them.
Compassion was expensive.
EMOTIONAL EXTINCTION
The day Ajifa realized she no longer felt fear was the day she understood what prison had done to her.
Fear had been replaced by calculation.
Pain had become data.
People had become variables.
She was not angry.
She was not sad.
She was empty—and emptiness was powerful.
THE VISITOR
Seven years after Ajifa entered the cage, a woman asked for her by name.
Yejide Ogunde.
The name meant nothing then.
Yejide was young, well-dressed, her eyes sharp in a way Ajifa recognized immediately. This was not a woman who believed in miracles. This was a woman who believed in leverage.
"I can get you out," Yejide said calmly, fingers folded on the table between them.
Ajifa studied her.
"Why?" Ajifa asked.
Yejide smiled—not kindly.
"Because you survived," she said. "And because I'm always interested in what survives places like this."
Ajifa felt nothing.
But somewhere deep, something shifted.
END POINT
Freedom came dressed as paperwork.
The court reversed the sentence with the same indifference it had delivered it. No apology. No explanation. Just a door opening.
Ajifa stepped out at twenty-one.
She did not look back.
Yejide waited for her outside.
"Freedom is expensive," Yejide said.
Ajifa met her gaze, unreadable.
"I know," Ajifa replied.
And for the first time since childhood, Ajifa walked into the unknown—
not realizing the cage had only changed shape.